Here's the The Lowdownfrom DN Journal,
updated dailyto
fill you in on the latest buzz going around the domain name industry.

The Lowdown is
compiled by DN Journal Editor & Publisher Ron
Jackson.

Crypto.com
Owner Says Stop Calling! No Interest in
Multi-Million $ Offers and No Fan of
Cryptocurrencies

A
very interesting new articleabout
the Crypto.com domain name
and its owner, written by Adrianne
Jeffries, was published at TheVerge.com
today. I found out about it when
Adrianne contacted me shortly before
publishing the piece to get some
background on current market
conditions for cryptocurrency
related domain names. As
you all know they have become very
popular with some selling for
millions of dollars (like ETH.com
for $2 million last fall).

Matt
Blaze, an Associate Professor at
the University of Pennsylvania
and a leading expert on cryptography
(he has a Ph.D. in computer science
from Princeton and over 41,000
followers on Twitter),
happens to own what may be the best
domain in the entire category in
Crypto.com. With the boom in
cryptocurrencies Blaze has been
besieged by people trying to buy the
domain from him and he is not happy
about it - especially
since

Crypto.com
Owner Matt Blaze(Photo from Twitter)

he insists the name is not for
sale at any price - and
especially not to anyone who would
use it for cryptocurrency purposes.
Blaze even has a warning notice on Crypto.com
stating "Many cryptocurrencies
are scams, and I strongly
advise against their use as
investment vehicles."

Reporter
Adrianne Jeffries

Blaze
also bemoans how the cryptocurrency frenzy has
muddied the original meaning
of "crypto" which
is the root of the
information security science
of cryptography - his
specialty. Blaze wrote
on Twitter, “I think
calling cryptocurrencies
‘crypto’ is a poor
choice, with bad
consequences for both
cryptography and
cryptocurrencies. That
doesn’t mean I’m some
kind of language
prescriptivist, and your
saying that ‘language
evolves’ or other such
prattle doesn’t invalidate
my concerns.”

As
hard as it may to be imagine
someone saying no thank
you to a multi-million
dollar payday, I have no
doubt Blaze is sincere. In
academic circles there are a
lot of brilliant people for
whom money is not at the top
of their priority list (my
daughter happens to be a
UPenn graduate so I
had the pleasure of meeting
many of them on the same
campus where Blaze now
works). So, despite the old
adage that "it never
hurts to try," it
probably is a waste of time
where Crypto.com is
concerned. It will not be a
waste of your time to read
Adrianne's fascinating full
article here
though!

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